Those up top (the Presidential Inaugural Committee) chose to utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology to stream the upcoming inaugural events for the new president of the United States. Though Microsoft certainly likes this idea, this leaves out thousands of people in the US and elsewhere who still cannot run Silverlight or an open source alternative on their systems from viewing the streamed video online. Update by Thom: Linux and PowerPC Mac fans rejoice, as they can watch the inauguration as well using Moonlight. Migel De Icaza wrote: "Microsoft worked late last night to get us access to the code that will be used during the inauguration so we could test it with Moonlight." Microsoft and the Moonlight team fixed this issue in one afternoon, so it might be a little rough.

Not exactly necessary, but thrown in for a humorous effect as well as to make an off-topic point. It's sad, but true, and I see it everywhere I go: your average user owns a piece of junk manufactured by Dell or HP that really shouldn't be running the system installed on it. It's cheap, and the guys at Best Buy or Wal-Mart will tell you it's a great system because they don't know any better. The average user likes the price, takes the word of the sales rep as golden, and buys the under qualified machine. Now we have five hundred thousand proud owners of new computers "running" Windows Vista. And you know what I mean by "running." Just because it has the sticker on it doesn't mean it should be running it. Manufacturers stretched the truth there, and I think that's one of the reasons so many people have hated Vista so much-- it really shouldn't be running on the hardware they said it could run on-- definitely partly MS's fault for saying it could. But anyway. I'm majorly getting off topic here. Please forgive.